


Everything Ends (Then Begins Again)

by SecretEnigma



Series: Final Fantasy XV Time Travel AUs [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bahamut Honestly Finds That Fair, Canonical Character Death, Depressed Noctis Lucis Caelum, Don't Worry the Time Travel Fixes That, Don't copy to another site, Don't worry he gets better, Everybody Lives, Everyone Is Protective of Noctis, F/M, Families of Choice, Fluff, Gen, Good Parent Regis Lucis Caelum, Hurt Noctis Lucis Caelum, Noctis Will Fix the Future If He Has To Stab Bahamut, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Protective Ignis Scientia, Protective Libertus Ostium, Protective Noctis Lucis Caelum, This Is Kind Of His Fault After All, Time Travel Fix-It, someday anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25342357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecretEnigma/pseuds/SecretEnigma
Summary: August 30th, M.E. 766: King Noctis Lucis Caelum dies on the throne to save the world from the Starscourge, leaving behind his three brothers-in-arms to rebuild in the light of a new dawn.August 16th, M.E. 744: Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum is attacked by daemons, suffers a grave injury, and falls into a coma.August 30th, M.E. 744: King Noctis Lucis Caelum opens his eyes once more.
Relationships: Clarus Amicitia & Cor Leonis & Regis Lucis Caelum, Crowe Altius & Libertus Ostium & Nyx Ulric, Crowe Altius & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia & Prompto Argentum & Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia, Libertus Ostium & Nyx Ulric, Luche Lazarus & Nyx Ulric, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret & Sylva Via Fleuret, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret/Noctis Lucis Caelum, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Libertus Ostium, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Nyx Ulric, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Regis Lucis Caelum, Ravus Nox Fleuret & Sylva Via Fleuret, Sylva Via Fleuret/Regis Lucis Caelum
Series: Final Fantasy XV Time Travel AUs [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1835323
Comments: 83
Kudos: 441





	1. New Game Plus

**Author's Note:**

> Another new WIP! Only this one is not so new, because this is the original FFXV time-travel that spawned both Deleantur verse and Nox verse. I wanted to have more prewritten chaps on this before I posted, but it was taking too long so I figured why not let's just go for it. What's one more WIP to add to the needs-to-update pile? *sarcasm*
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoy! I have some headcanons for this on my Tumblr if you wanna take a look and learn more about this verse: https://secret-engima.tumblr.com/tagged/Everything-Ends-%28Begins-Again%29-verse/chrono Or just come say hello in the notes, that works too.

Floating. Drifting in a slow, endless current. Not alive, but not quite dead. Not completely. Not yet.

Soon though.

Soon enough that it didn’t matter that there was a sliver of life still left, bobbing along in the invisible current. Soon, the sliver would be gone too. Then there would be rest at long last. Yet there was no sense of peace with that knowledge, no sense of relief at finally being able to sleep without worry or care for eternity.

Something lingered in the sliver, pulled and keened for the Before, for the Other that existed outside of the void. An emotion. Regret? Yes, regret. Regret for everything that had been lost.

Regret for everything that could not be changed.

Regret for everything that could not be returned to.

Or could it?

A flicker of something else. Determination, obstinance. The sliver stopped drifting, began to struggle against the current. There was a moment, a breath that contained an eternity, in which nothing happened. Nothing changed. Then, slowly, painstakingly, the sliver pushed back, moved against the current. Ripples formed, the current pushed harder, trying to drown the resistance, trying to stop the sliver that worked opposite to the path intended for it. The sliver kept pushing, kept fighting, gradually picking up speed until it was not only resisting the current, it was **reversing it**.

Impressions flashed, lightning bolts across a patternless nothing, as the sliver gained strength and speed, gathered lost pieces of itself until it was no longer a sliver but a person, forcing the tides to change, to bend, to **obey**. The impressions came faster, each one dragging emotions with it, knowledge, memories.

_“So … this is how you end it?”_ Hate. Sadness. Pity. A flash of steel in the rain of a starless sky. Yellow eyes that were so tired and smug and hateful and pained. _Who? Why?_

_“Off my chair, Jester. The king sits there.”_ Determination. Fury. Disgust. A shattered room, a stolen throne, a mocking laugh. Bodies on the ceiling, disgraced when they should have been respected and loved. _Who? Do I know you?_

_“I’ve served as your Shield through thick and thin. No matter what, I’ve got your back! Now. And_ ** _always_** _!”_ Fierce devotion. Competition. Trust. Amber eyes and painted feathers, the crash of a shield and a voice like a growling storm. _Brother. My Shield. You are my Shield. I know your name. What is your name?_

_“I owe Noct everything … for standing by me always. And now … it’s my turn to_ ** _stand by him_** _!”_ Affection. Amusement. Trust. Blue eyes and a wide smile, the click of a camera and a laugh like a child’s. Devotion that overcame even the strongest of fears. _Little brother. Trusted Friend. I know you. Who are you?_

_“The decision is yours to make and yours alone. But do remember we will stand with you always and help you bear your burdens. Don’t be afraid to let us share the load.”_ Calm. An affection that ran deep and steady. A trust so deep it was faith. A wink of glasses in the light, a featherlight touch between the shoulders and a steady presence that was an unfailing anchor in a storm. _My wisdom, my common sense. My first brother. I know who you are. Why can’t I remember your name?_

_“It has been the highest honor … to serve the two finest kings … Lucis has ever known. Perhaps we’ll meet again … at daybreak.”_ There was distance to this voice. Respect. Affection, but not the same kind of affection as the voices from before. Tired shoulders and solemn eyes, a mentor and a warrior, but not a brother. _You were my father’s. For his sake you stayed by my side. For his sake you helped me find my way._

_“Remember, those ain’t your bodyguards, they’re your brothers. Trust in ‘em. Always.”_ Again, a distance, but still a lingering affection as well as respect. Snapping temper and creaking joints that hid a razor mind and a gentle touch. _You were my father’s too. You helped me when I was lost, you mourned because you weren’t there to help him in the end._

The current renewed its efforts, went from surprised and baffled to raging against the sliver-thing-person that was bending it to his will. It distracted him —and he was a him, not an it, he was person not a thing— from the voices and the impressions they held. He was almost knocked back, swept away in the current, but desperation and fire kept him going, kept him pushing. He had to go back. The voices were precious, they needed him as he needed them. He had to find them, remember them, go back to them.

More voices joined in, impressions following so thick and fast there was no time to analyze. Encouragements, insults, advice, questions. Young, old, friend, stranger, enemy, sister, father, brother. Each one came and went, each one left behind another piece to his fractured puzzle, another swell of power that helped him change the course of the current to his will.

_“Thank you, Noctis-sama!”_

_“Want me to take you on a tour of the town, Noct?”_

_“Stop mopin’ and start hopin’.”_

_“Good luck, Prince!”_

_“Heir to a crown like no other. Keh, so this is the ‘Chosen King’.”_

_“Look out!”_

_“Oh, what fun it will be to watch those I revile tear each other apart~.”_

_“Watch it!”_

_“Such a tease, Noct~.”_

_“Come forth, O Chosen.”_

_“Wake up sleepy-head. Rise and shine.”_

_“Walk tall, my son.”_

Something screeched off in the distance. The void shuddered and began to crack as he struggled further upriver, closer to the voices, always the voices. Four voices in particular came back again and again, bombarding him with laughter, tears, images, and promises.

They told him that he was a prince. They told him that he was a king. They told him of a journey, they told him of beginnings and endings. They told him of laughter and tears, anger and joy, crushing grief and soaring victory. They told him they were friends. They told him they were brothers. They told him of how they had followed him to the end of the world. They told him of how they had waited for him to return even when it seemed like he never would. With every story and every shout, a piece of him clicked back into place. Yet something was still missing.

He crashed into a swell of the current, his progress faltered, then stalled altogether as the void shook and screeched and tried to swallow him back down, to force him to submit to What-Was-And-Had-Always-Been-Destined. He struggled, but he wasn’t whole. There was something still **missing** inside him and without it he could go no further. Without it he would lose, fail his quest of going back. _Back where? Where am I even going?_

_What … what was I doing again?_

The current seized his doubts and confusion, capitalized on them. His feet slipped on a riverbed that was there-but-wasn’t and he began to slide back. _No! No, stop!_ He slid further, a piece of him broke off, lost to the shaking void. Fear filled him, _I can’t! Stop it!_ Another slip, another piece lost. _Help! Help me! Someone help me! Tell me what to do! Tell me where I’m going! Anyone, please!_

The current suddenly split, forced to either side of him by another presence that now stood before him like a shield. A familiar, heart-wrenching scent filled his nostrils and in his mind’s eye he saw blue flowers that covered the hillsides. The presence turned and he thought he saw a flash of blue eyes and sun-kissed hair. Then-.

_“When the world falls down all around you, and hope is lost. When you find yourself alone amid a lightless place, look to the distance. Know that I am there … and that I watch over you, always … dear Noctis.”_

Everything snapped into place and suddenly he **knew**. He knew who he was, he knew where he had been, he knew what he had done, and who was calling to him. He knew what he was trying to go back to, who he was fighting for.

Prompto.

Gladio.

Ignis.

**Luna**.

_“I’ve made my peace with it … but even so…”_

_“Walk tall … my friends.”_

He had said those things, and he had meant them at the time. But right here, with the strange current-that-wasn’t trying to drown him and memories of everything he had loved and lost and struggled to save thrumming in his soul, he wouldn’t, **couldn’t** , just let go. He had to go up the current, he had to **fight**.

“Help me!” The cry ripped from his throat, a command and a plea all at once. The presence in front of him —Luna, his Luna— responded in an instant, grabbing his hands and pulling him farther upriver without hesitation. Other presences bloomed to his senses. There were two pairs of hands on his back, keeping him from falling over while three figures waded up the current and forced it to part way for their king. They rushed upriver, never stopping, never slowing, continuing to pull and push and clear his path for as long as he commanded even though he didn’t know how far he had to go before he reached … wherever it was he had to go to get out of the void.

A final presence flared, a presence he knew but had not felt in years. A thin chirping cry crested over the howl of the current and quaking groans of the void, “Noctis! This way, Noctis!” There was tiny red light, a spark just to his right, and Noctis veered without hesitation because Carbuncle had never led him wrong before, had helped him and protected him when he was child lost in his own mind. Carbuncle had helped him find his way then, he would help him now.

The current surged one last time, so strong and desperate that it forced him to hesitate even with the help of the others. Noctis grit his teeth and snarled at the current that was trying to force him back, trying to dictate his path. _No! Enough!_ He had had **enough** of destiny, **enough** of high-handed ancients and grudge-holding masterminds telling him what to do, pulling him along on their strings. He had payed his price, he had walked tall to his death with a willing heart, he had done his duty, fulfilled his destiny, done **everything** that had been demanded of him even when it meant leaving behind the people he loved.

Now? Now it was **his turn** to decide where he went and what he would do and He. Wanted. Out.

Power swelled inside him — _his power. The power that he had earned through blood and tears and trials_ — and Noctis Lucis Caelum flung himself the rest of the way forward and out. Out of the current, out of the void, out of the nothingness that had tried to claim him, dragging the other presences who had helped him fight along with him as he clawed his way up the invisible bank and into the unknown. Behind him, the void shattered, something howled, and two of the presences were abruptly snatched away from his side. He had no time to search for them, to call them back, because an instant later Noctis felt pain burn through his every bone and pore and he was tumbling uncontrollably down a hill he could not see. There was a sensation of sliding and the spasmodic jolt of a sleeper coming back to himself.

Suddenly he couldn’t hear the void anymore, or the current that had tried to take him. He felt dirt under his hands and tasted the unwelcomely-familiar copper tang of blood on his lips. Light poked at his eyelids and he heard muffled shouting, as if the speakers were underwater or Noctis himself was very, very concussed.

“What was that? What was that just now? The daemon-!”

Hands —large and calloused and shaking terribly— grabbed at Noctis and rolled him over, “Noctis! My son, please, open your eyes!” _Dad? Why are you here?_ Noctis struggled to open his eyes —he wanted to see him, hug him, tell his father he loved him one last time—, but his throbbing body wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t respond to his demands. He was pressed to a warm chest, able to hear a thrumming, frantic heartbeat and his father’s broken whisper of, “Please. Not my son. Don’t take my son yet. He’s too young, he isn’t a king yet, he’s **just a boy**.” _Dad, I’m right here. I found you. It’s okay. Everything hurts, but it’s okay._

Noctis thought he heard a sob and wished he could move. But his entire body was a pulsing fire of pain and nothing he tried seemed to work in making himself move. Another voice he knew well, but this time tight with fear, —why did Cor sound so afraid? Cor was hardly ever afraid— spoke from a short distance away, “Your Majesty. Your Majesty,” the voice came closer and there was a jerk and Noctis could almost imagine Cor grabbing his father’s shoulder. Could almost see that stern, stony look on his face that served as a mask for his worry, “ **Regis**! The prince has lost a great deal of blood, we need to take him to a hospital. There’s no time to waste.” _There are hospitals in the afterlife? Wait. Am I dead?_ He didn’t feel dead, but he also remembered dying, and it was so hard to **think** and remember and reason past the pain.

No one answered his question. He couldn’t really bring himself to care. He heard his father voice a shaky agreement and felt his father’s arms lift him with an ease that they hadn’t been able to manage since Noctis was a small child. He was held close to a familiar chest and felt the swaying of his father’s strides as the man ran.

Darkness pulled at Noctis, trying to coax him away from the pain and into sleep, but fear of returning to the current and the void made him fight it. A tiny choked whimper escaped his lips and the hands holding him clenched tighter,“Hang on, Noctis. Hang on.”

They jerked to a halt and there was the bob of his father sliding into a seat. An engine came to life around them and they began moving again. _Ignis? Ignis, are you driving? Where are you taking me? Why does it hurt so much? Ignis talk to me!_ Desperation and confusion clawed at him, stripping away the determination that had helped him escape the void. He couldn’t feel his powers anymore, he couldn’t see, everything hurt. He wanted an explanation. Or some painkillers.

He really, really wanted his brothers.

_Prompto, Gladio, Ignis!_ A rattling, copper-tasting whine escaped his lips, “Igg-.”

Ignis didn’t respond, but his father’s voice shushed soothingly in his ear, “You’re going to be alright, Noctis. You’re going to get through this. Just hang on a while longer. I know it hurts, but you’re going to be okay. Just stay with me, my son…”

The rest of his father’s words were lost to Noctis as the darkness tugging at his senses finally won the struggle, cutting off Noctis’s attempts to make sense of what was going on anymore and dragging him into the painless bliss of sleep.


	2. Awakenings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An update! Warning for major angst because Time-Travel and Canonical Character Deaths being rebooted. I warned in the tag this fic would have angst. There's a happy ending coming, but first there must be Much Angst.
> 
> Also a warning for ... implied suicidal thoughts? They aren't actually that, the scene is referencing a Culture Thing from my world-building on tumblr but if you haven't read those or don't realize the character comes from that culture, then it looks like implied suicidal thoughts/attempt. Again- it's not, and I honestly don't think it's that bad or graphic or anything, but I figured I'd give a heads up. If you really wanna skip, then start skipping when you read "He staggered out of the bathroom and made for the kitchen" then you can resume a few paragraph/lines down where it reads "Penance is enough".
> 
> Also several of the POVs in this chap go unnamed, but should be guessable. You can guess if you want, but I'm not gonna say if you get them right. ;)

It was close to midnight when Sylva Nox Fleuret, Oracle and Queen of Tenebrae, awoke to the sensation that something was terribly, terribly wrong. She sat up, eyes alert and wide despite her deep sleep moments before, heart racing for reasons she could not explain. She listened intently, but heard nothing unusual in the nighttime quiet of the Fenestala Manor. Flicking her blankets back, Sylva slid out of bed and padded with bare feet across the cold floor to the glass doors of her balcony, her trident snatched from its rack as she passed.

The double doors to the balcony slid open without a sound and Sylva stepped out into the night air. She stared out across the gardens that glowed softly in the light of the protective, anti-daemon runes. The runes were effective in keeping daemons far away even without conventional lighting or other defensive measures, yet their glow revealed no source for her sudden, gripping unease. Nothing stood out to her, there were no visible breaches in the runes or the manor walls, there were no cries of alarm, no sign of human intruders. Everything appeared to be as it should. The feeling of unease refused to leave. It coiled in her stomach and clenched white-knuckled fingers around her trident. The feeling grew with every passing second until her skin prickled with goosebumps and her breath shook from the adrenaline coursing in her veins.

Then she felt it.

The magical pressure in the air, a building hum of energy unlike anything she had experienced before. Nervous dread shivered up her spine, the sense that **something** was coming, and coming fast, “Capreolus? Capreolus, are you there?” There was no response from the Messenger she had communed with for years. Capreolus was not there, he was not causing the strange buildup of energy nor did he appear bearing a message to explain it.

Silence fell, fragile yet heavy as Sylva struggled with what to do. Her every instinct screamed that something was happening, something unforeseen and dangerous, yet there was no physical threat to fight and no evidence to condone waking the rest of the servants and guards. Sylva was just debating leaving her room altogether to check on the night watch or if she should try to find Capreolus instead when the clock in her room chimed the midnight hour and the magical pressure in the air suddenly **erupted**.

Sylva fell to her knees, too breathless to scream as the world shattered all around her. Images flashed before her eyes and a million voices seemed to cry out in a jumble of emotions and purposes and pleas that drowned out any thoughts she might have had, clawing at her mind with knowledge she wasn’t meant to hold and memories that weren’t her own. In the garden, the runes shone with a sunlike brilliance, burning so feverishly that the mansion and all the nearby landscape was bathed light like a noonday sun.

A swell of bright blue energy as high as a tidal wave rushed out from the horizon, sweeping over the manor and setting the sky on fire with a sprawling aurora unlike anything that had been seen before or anything that would be seen again. In the seconds that the Wave rushed over her, Sylva saw the future-that-had-been-and-was-destined-to-be. She saw her children grow and split apart, one set in her duty and the other lost in his grief. She saw four men barely out of boyhood wage a war against the world, to save the world. She saw death and sorrow, triumph and sacrifice. She heard her daughter’s farewell to the prince she loved and bore witness to the rage of the king against the Accursed who had taken so much.

She saw destiny fulfilled with the death of the last Lucis Caelum and she felt the moment that Lucis Caelum defied his end and clawed his way back, back through time and life and destiny. She felt the moment he reemerged from the overarching currents of time with a surge of power so great that for a moment it covered the world with his will, imprinted his power and the memory of his sacrifice across Eos years before it was meant to be.

Then the wave of power rushed past her, snatching away all memory of what she had seen, leaving only the unshakable impression that something —that everything— had been irreversibly changed.

Sylva hunched there on her balcony, the only thing keeping her from a fetal position on the floor being the upright trident clenched tight in her fingers as she gasped and cried for reasons she could no longer remember. She reined in her tears and controlled her breathing with difficulty. She was a queen, an Oracle, and she had to compose herself and investigate. Forcing herself to her feet, she swept back into her room then out into the hall, intent on finding the captain of the guard and seeing if her spymaster had returned from his latest journey. She needed to know where that magic wave had come from and what had caused it, she needed-.

Two servants rushed by, pale and shaking and intent and she was about to call out to them to demand where they were going when she heard it. A gut-wrenching scream, filled with anguish and confusion and torment that echoed through the manor despite its size. The sound of an animal being tortured to the point of death only to be dragged back again and again by its tormentor. A wail of horrors untold and unspeakable.

Sylva took off running for the sound, outstripping the servants despite their head start as the Queen and the Oracle took backseat to the Mother in her. Because she knew what kinds of torment —the agonizing, sanity-shattering horrors, the willfully inflicted torture— that caused men to make those noises …

And she knew the voice currently breaking from them as her son’s.

* * *

Ravus woke up to fire.

Magic seared through his body, wild and **burning** — _like his arm had burned when he put on that thrice-cursed ring, the smell of his own cooking flesh imprinting in his nostrils as his arm withered from the heat of judgement and_ ** _scorn_** _and ancient, uncaring magic_ —. He screamed — _or did he? Could he anymore when half his face and body had been warped by the plague of the Starscourge?_ — and rolled out of his bed — _bed? What bed? He had died on the hard metal floor of Zegnautus Keep_ —. He hit the floor — _carpet not metal why-where-how_ — with a jarring thud that he barely felt through the fire.

Another scream ripped from his throat as he writhed and clawed at the ground. Struggled to understand the clashing waves of knowledge and memory and circumstance churning in his _head-heart-soul-reality_. A door slammed open somewhere and hands pawed at him — _daemons. Daemon claws and howls and snarls as they came to infect him, make him_ ** _one of them_** — and Ravus’s scream turned to a feral snarl as he lashed out blindly — _couldn’t see, hurt to see, didn’t dare look up to see the bodies-fire_ - _Luna-dead-on-the-ground-because-of-_ ** _him_** —.

The hands-claws-talons retreated from his wild flailing for a moment — _or maybe from the fire burning Ravus to ash, the cursed beasts hated fire, even after they were bottled up tight in metal casings and touted as soldiers_ — only to return larger and stronger and pin him to the floor. Ravus bucked under their grip, a scream of pain and rage escaping his throat as he fought to get free — _because he couldn’t stay, he had to move, the king was in danger and Luna would never forgive him if he didn’t help, didn’t atone_ —.

Sounds rattled in his ears, there were voices he knew yet didn’t, understood yet couldn’t. Voices of ghosts. Voices of the past. Voices of guards who had died years ago when Fenestala Manor had been taken —t _he day his mother burned and the troopers came and all Ravus had seen was the turned back, not the price that staying would have cost them all_ —. His eyes slid open — _when had they been shut? Hadn’t he just been staring down the daemons holding him captive a moment ago?_ — and he caught sight of his mother over the shoulders of the ghosts holding him down. Her face was twisted with fear and grief and worry and his next scream was mixed with apologies and pleas even Ravus couldn’t make sense of.

The fire had receded at some point, but the confusion in his mind had not. He was trapped in some kind of loop. One moment he would be lying on the floor of his childhood room, with ghosts fretting, trying to comfort and restrain. The next he would be in Zegnautus Keep, fighting against the plague-born instincts of _angry-starving-kill-_ ** _kill-kill-_ **while begging his king to just end it, **end it please**. Then he would be back in Altissia, cradling his little sister in his arms — _the sister he should have been walking down the aisle, not carrying to her grave_ — as the rain came down and mingled with his tears.

A blur of gold and blue and white filled his vision and suddenly the hands-claws-talons were gone and there was a cool, shaking hand on his forehead and a familiar voice in his ear murmuring the words of blessing and peace in the Star Tongue she had loved so much. Everything froze and the _whirling-breaking-burning_ of his mind ground to a halt as his eyes focused hazily on a sight he never thought he would see again, “L-luna?”

His voice was hoarse and broken, scratched raw from his previous screams. His eyes were blurry with tears of pain and grief, but he could still see that it was Luna. The Luna of his childhood, little Luna from before the Empire came and everything changed between them and how could that be? Luna was grown and gone, **he** was grown and gone — _or at least he should be, he remembered it so_ — and Luna at this age had not yet learned to speak the Tongue of the Stars so smoothly, so fluently that even most full-fledged Oracles struggled to match it- Oh.

Oh.

He raised a shaking hand — _flesh hand, not metal, whole and unburned how-how-how-?_ — to scrub his eyes clear. Then Ravus lowered his shaking fingers and stared deep into the watery eyes of the little sister still murmuring soft words in the normally guttural, harsh Tongue of the Stars.

And he understood.

Fresh tears welled up in his eyes and apologies spilled from a hoarse, cracked throat as he reached out a trembling hand to cradle her face. Luna just smiled at him and held tight to the hand on her cheek with the one of her own that was not clutching a trident too large for her child-sized hands. She forgave him, and that just made him weep more because he did not deserve such forgiveness, such unfaltering love. He did not deserve the second chance he had apparently received alongside his much more worthy sister, not after all he had done and the puppet strings he had wrapped around his own limbs for **years** out of a broken, misdirected desire for revenge.

Around him, servants and guards who had not yet been turned into ghosts watched on in wary, grieving confusion and the mother who had not yet sacrificed herself for her son — _and now never would if Ravus had anything to say about it_ — cried for the children that had just grown up and lived and died in the span of a single wave of magic without her knowing.

* * *

Luna sat up straight in her bed, mouth open in a silent cry and both hands reaching out instinctively to grasp something she was sure had been there a moment ago. Her body tingled and her side pulsed briefly from where the knife had pierced it even as her mind rushed with memories and knowledge and understanding. For a long moment, she just stayed there, heart pounding in her chest, her hands — _too small, far too small, how far back had Noctis carried her?_ — outstretched as if to catch something already snatched away.

Things settled into place, the mind and maturity and heart of the twenty-four year old Oracle settling into place instead of the twelve year old Princess and Oracle-in-Training that had gone to bed that evening. Luna took a deep breath, savoring the ability to do so without stabbing pain in her side — _there was no dagger there now, no Ardyn trying to twist fate to his whims and destroy things not meant to be harmed_ —. Then she jolted at the sound of a tortured scream.

Luna was on her feet in an instant, running down the familiar — _but also not familiar, the Manor had been rebuilt and rearranged after the Empire came so many years ago_ — halls in search of the scream’s source. Another howl of _anguish-pain-rage-confusion_ echoed through the wing of the manor and Luna felt her heart lurch in her chest. Because that was Ravus. Her big brother, her greatest protector and dearest friend despite the chasm that had formed between them after their mother’s death. Luna skidded to a halt in the doorway and managed somehow not to burst into tears at the sight of her mother — _alive, not burned, not gone_ — hovering just inside the door, calling out to her son as he writhed and screamed and fought the guards trying to hold him down so the manor doctors could find what ailed him.

Luna tried to enter, to help her brother — _because she was an Oracle, healing was her life and her work all in one_ —, but was held back by a servant who only saw her child body and assumed that she would not know how to help her sibling. She stayed there, the servant’s hand growing lax on her shoulder as Luna listened and cried over her brother’s howls. She didn’t understand what had happened. Was he having a reaction to the power that had brought Luna and Noctis back in time? Had something attacked? This had not happened the first time around, she was certain, so why-?

Ravus finally caught sight of their mother and something in his already twisted expression shattered. His screams shifted from wordless howls to jumbled begging for forgiveness and unintelligible confessions of sins only Luna knew of or understood. Realization speared her heart and she twisted out of the servant’s grip. Before she could grasp fully what she was doing, her trident — _not hers yet, her mother’s, but also Luna’s because Luna had_ ** _earned it_** _by the ancient rite of passage four years from now_ — was in her hand and she had forced the guards aside by threatening them with its sharp points.

Her mother and her people cried out to her, demanding to know what she was thinking and to get away because Ravus was not in his right mind and might hurt her, but Luna did not listen to them. She fell to her knees at her brother’s side and laid a shaking hand on his forehead. Words of Star Tongue spilled from her lips before she could consider the ramifications —she wasn’t supposed to know those words yet, only Oracles could speak the tongue of the Astrals and only those who entered into covenant with them could speak it so **well** —, but the ancient words were far more powerful and attention-grabbing than their human counterparts and Ravus needed an anchor, needed something different to break the cycle of nightmares in which he was locked.

Sure enough, his screaming stopped abruptly and his eyes focused past his tears, latching onto her face with mix of confusion and disbelief and recognition that was heartbreaking but still so much better than his earlier insanity, “L-luna?”

She didn’t stop whispering in the Star Tongue, did not stop her murmuring for fear he would lose himself again if she stopped too soon. She could see the moment he realized, how he scrubbed his eyes of tears so as to lock gazes with her and make sure that he was right. She saw the moment he **understood**. The tears started again as his hand —unburned, unmarred from the mistakes of a broken heart and a poisoned mind— reached up and cradled her cheek like she was something delicate and glass-fragile, “Luna,” he rasped, hoarse and broken and so, so old compared to his body now, “Luna, I’m sorry. You were right. You were- all along you were right and I- Oh Astrals I- I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Luna felt any words she might have said die on her lips. Because no words, no blessings or healing incantations could fix this. Only time could, and even time would not be able to mend all of the damage that had been wrought to the both of them. Instead, Luna smiled, let him see that she still loved him, still forgave him, because she could never hold his mistakes against him, not when their origin lay at the feet of Ardyn’s words and their mother’s death. Not when she knew — _had always known_ — that his every mistake had only been his attempts to help her, to save her from a destiny they both knew was coming to swallow her whole.

The two siblings stayed like that for a long time, oblivious to anything but each other and the broken future-past that lay between them as a bridge to the rift that had kept them apart for so long.

* * *

Ignis hit the floor with a thud, disorientation causing his limbs to flail and his breaths to shorten to tight pants. Memories warred with knowledge, confusion with realization as he scrambled to understand where he was and what was going on. _Noctis-gone-Noctis-here-young-old-dark-light-why-how-where-?_

His training took over and he focused on taking deep, near-exaggerated inhales through his nose and slow silent exhales through barely parted lips. This was not his first panic attack. He’d had many ever since the ring had taken his sight from him _—fire-burning-protect-protect-please-_ ** _please_** _—_ and then after Ardyn had taken his Prince-King-Brother — _gone, forever gone, gone and he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep his promise, couldn’t help even when he had_ ** _known_** —.

_No. Stop. Do not think about that. Don’t think at all. Just breathe. In, two-three-four. Out, two-three-four. In, two-three-four. Out, two-three-four._

It didn’t work as well as he’d hoped it would. He could feel tears slide from his eyes — _the mechanism for clearing dust and restoring vision was one of the few things that still worked in his permanently blinded eyes, the irony was never lost on him_ — and his heart thrumming in his throat. His eyelids squeezed shut — _not that it made a difference, but it was an old habit he couldn’t break_ —, trying to ward off the visions and vivid memories piling through his head. It was like a waking nightmare, only longer and faster and more disjointed. In the space of seconds he had relived Altissia, Zegnautus Keep, the Endless Night, Noctis’s last words as he walked up those steps-.

Coming into the ruined throne room as sunlight — _so bright even he could dimly see it_ — streamed down on the cooling body of his Friend-Brother-King who was pinned to the throne by the sword of his father and still clutching the picture he had chosen from Prompto’s collection in one hand.

His memory of it — _of Prompto’s quiet sobs and Gladio’s singular, primal roar of grief_ — was a collection of touch, smell, hearing, and the very dim, near unidentifiable shapes his eyes could still make out. But somehow it was, and he suspected always would be, the most vivid of his memories. It was the one that haunted him most, even over Noctis’s face upon hearing that his father was gone or finding Noctis and Luna — _one dead and the other so close to following his fiancé down that path_ — on the ruined shrine of the Tide-Mother.

A choked noise escaped his lips and he reached up both hands to shakily press them against his useless eyes — _where was his visor? No wait- it broke in the last fight and he still hadn’t replaced it_ —, trying vainly to rein his emotions in. He couldn’t afford to do this right now. He couldn’t afford to break just yet. He had been on his way to meet Gladio, Prompto, and Grand Marshal Cor and decide how to move forward. How to begin setting up a ruling system beyond “I am Cor the Immortal who commands the people in charge of bringing you food and light and what I say goes”. There were relief forces to delegate and exploration teams to assign and a thousand other details that went into rebuilding a broken world that needed to be done before people got over the shock of seeing the sun again and began to remember pre-apocalypse grudges and complaints.

Though, considering it had only been two weeks since Noctis- since the first sunrise in ten years, Ignis doubted that anyone would be getting over the marvel of sunshine anytime soon.

_Later. You can break down later. Maybe even get out that nice bottle of Galahd brandy Gladio hid under his cot and get spectacularly drunk. Gladio would be thrilled to finally see you black-out drunk for the first time in your life anyway. Prompto will no doubt take pictures before joining in._ Ignis took a few more deep breaths and pushed down the yawning chasm of _grief-despair-anguish-gone-gone-gone-_ that had been threatening to swallow him whole ever since Noctis’s de- the first sunrise. He couldn’t give in to it and the urges it brought, he had promised Noct he would walk tall and after failing to keep so many other promises he wouldn’t- **couldn’t** break this one too. He sat up, intending to resume his day.

It was then he noticed that something was wrong.

The ground beneath his hands was not dusty, debris-riddled ground at all, but was instead smooth, polished wood. So smooth and sanded and polished that even his experienced fingers had to work to feel the seams between the boards. The moment he realized that impossibility — _such smooth wood floors had become a fantasy in the crowded, makeshift buildings of the outposts, no one had time for such pretty precision_ — other things sprung to his notice.

No one was talking to him, no one was asking him what was wrong or cursing at him to move out of the way. He had only been a few yards away from Gladio and Prompto — _he had memorized their footsteps years ago_ — and they would have caught up and spotted him lying there panicking by now.

Only now he couldn’t hear their footsteps.

He couldn’t hear anyone’s footsteps.

No, wait, if he strained his hearing, he **could** hear footsteps, lots of them. People were running, the echo of their steps had a slight squeak-clack sound to it. Not enough squeak to be linoleum, not enough crunch to be concrete or the dirty, rubble-strewn floors that were the norm nowadays. They were running across stone then, but clean, unbroken stone that did not break down into gravel easily. Possibly marble? Where in Eos had someone gotten enough **marble** to waste it on an outpost floor? And why hadn’t he known about it before?

There was muffled shouting, too muffled for him to make out, coming from both above and below, though mostly below. The runners were not underground, the sound wasn’t muffled enough for that. A floor combined with several feet of packed concrete, dirt, and stone suppressed sound far more than what he was hearing. There was only a floor between them then, so he was in the second story of a building or higher. But the outpost inside of Insomnia — _a section of subway that had not been ripped to shreds by daemons and errant magitek troopers somehow_ — was already underground and had no lower levels.

It did not have polished wood or marble floors either. Which meant that somehow he had moved locations during his panic attack. Which was near impossible because he hadn’t been panicking **that** much — _certainly not enough to, for instance, pass out_ — and if he had, Gladiolus or Prompto would have made sure to go with him and explain were he was and why he’d been moved. An enemy? Unlikely. Even assuming that his panic attack had been somehow bad enough to prevent his noticing someone moving him from the premises of the outpost, other people would have noticed and stopped the intruder. Violently.

Negotiations with foreign entities was something of a dying art in a world where most of your enemies were starving animals or daemons out to impale you on their claws.

Ignis spread his senses out, trying to determine his location in more detail. There was a long obstruction —a piece of furniture perhaps?— just to his right, so close he was almost touching it, and another smaller obstruction just behind him and to his left. His fingers rapped noisily against the wood —there was no one near enough for the sound to alert them to his status so far as he could tell and an enemy would have bound him rather than leave him on their nice floor anyway— and he listened to the minute echo. The room was large, but not enormously so. It was roughly as large as a bedroom or sitting room would have been back before the Endless Night, though now such a space was considered to be a spacious apartment size rather than the size of a single-purpose room.

His nostrils flared as he breathed in cautiously. Wood, polish —of wood and leather varieties—, herbal air freshener —now there was a novelty he never thought he’d smell again, it was his old favorite blend as well—, a hint of leather-musk and fabric soap —that meant there was freshly washed fabric nearby and where had someone gotten actual fabric soap instead of making do with steam cleaning?—. And was that book paper and fresh ink he smelled?

Ignis curled his feet beneath him —he was barefoot, when had that happened?— and made to roll into a crouch so as to inspect his surroundings further. He ended up overbalancing and clutching desperately at the obstruction on his right instead. The obstruction turned out to be fabric-covered —the fabric was thick and puffy, a duvet of some kind?— and he ended up sprawling to the ground anyway with a pile of fabric on his back and shoulders. _What in the name of the Astrals?_ He kicked the duvet off and tried again, nearly toppling over a second time before he managed to correct himself and stand.

His body was all wrong. The sensation of … of wrongness —Prompto was wearing off on him, he should be more descriptive than that— permeated every one of his remaining senses and set his hair on end. After becoming almost entirely blind, Ignis had been forced to be intimately aware of his own body. How he stood, where he was standing, what the surface beneath his feet was like, how much reach he had and what he could sense within his personal space. A thousand and one details he had never had to pay attention to before now had to be not only noticed, but analyzed within the space of nanoseconds as well. After ten years, that kind of categorization and analysis had become a subconscious function. He knew exactly what his body was doing, how it was doing, and whether something was wrong with himself or his environment that might prove detrimental.

And right now that subconscious function was screaming at him. His limbs were incorrectly proportioned, in some ways too long and in some ways too short when compared to other parts of his body. He flexed his hands, curling his fingers into his palm. His fingers were too short, not flexible enough, as if all the training he had undertaken during the Endless Night to make his hands absolutely steady and his motor control almost surgeon-level fine was … gone. His hands were steady enough for a normal person, but to him they might as well have been shaking like he was on a drug overdose. Maybe he was, it would explain a few things, but this did not feel like a drug hallucination and he could not pinpoint any other symptoms that might indicate someone had overdosed him on something.

He needed to get out of here. He needed to find someone with functioning eyes that could tell him if he looked different or if it was just his own senses playing havoc with him. He needed to determine his location and whether the people running and shouting below him were hostiles.

He pulled instinctively on air even though he knew nothing would happen —the Crystal was gone and magic no longer existed— and was astonished when he felt a familiar dagger hilt materialize in his left palm. _What in the name of the Astrals?_ That … should not have worked. It hadn’t worked for the past two weeks, so why was he able to call one of his lost daggers now when all of the weapons he had sheathed on his body —and his original clothes too— were missing?

He was beginning to think that he was missing a very large and very important chunk of time in his memories. Though why an enemy would change him into silk pajamas —he was surprised silk even **existed** anymore, honestly— was beyond his understanding at the moment.

Ignis managed to find his way to the door, nearly stumbling several times as he misjudged his legs’ capabilities and overbalanced, which almost caused him to knock into the other obstructions in the room —a chair with a fully functional cushion, a low coffee table, and the edge of a carpet—. Silently cursing his loss of soundless movement —or competent, well-balanced movement at all— he managed to locate the doorknob and test it.

It was locked, but only by a simple doorknob latch, which he promptly turned. Testing the knob again to confirm it was not unlocked, Ignis listened hard for sounds of anyone nearby and —after determining that his section of whatever-this-building-was was otherwise unoccupied— he yanked open the door.

He promptly screamed in shock and fell back, hyperventilating in renewed panic as he scrambled to make sense of the sudden, agonizing assault to his senses. His eyelids screwed shut and his right arm flew up to cover the lids, granting merciful darkness that was only interrupted by dancing, flickering spots of color that he knew weren’t real. It was only after he had realized what he had just thought that he stopped breathing entirely and went deathly still.

There had been something other than darkness. Something **noticeably** different from the darkness that had been his companion and enemy and ally all at once for ten years.

He lowered his arm and cautiously slitted his eyelids. He swallowed back another cry and slammed them shut again when he was assaulted a second time by the brilliant light spilling in from the doorway. His breathing had restarted, but he had to struggle to keep it even marginally steady as realization and disbelief warred in his mind.

Light. The pain had come from his eyes —eyes that shouldn’t feel anything anymore, hadn’t for years because the nerves were too damaged— because of too bright a light. Even pointing his face directly at the sunrise with his glasses off did not garner that kind of reaction. Nothing did. Except now.

Ignis attempted to open his eyes for a third time and managed to keep them open again despite the stabbing pain it caused in the back of his head. He stumbled out into the light, eyes flicking back and forth as he tried and failed to process the fact that there were now **colors** to the shapes he sensed in front and around him. There were shadows and contrast and detailed shapes and pinpoint locations despite the fact that he hadn’t touched anything other than the wall —the only thing keeping him upright now— and- and-.

By the Astrals he could **see**.

Tears pricked his eyes again —though from the pain and disorientation or confused happiness he could not tell— and Ignis just … stood there. Trying to process the fact that he could see actual shapes and actual colors and light beyond the dim shifting of black-to-gray that had been his only indicator for ten years. It was overwhelming. Too overwhelming. He felt like he was going to throw up or faint or start screaming most unbecomingly or all three at once because after ten years of darkness and shadows this was all **too much**.

He snapped his eyelids tight shut and focused on breathing. He ignored everything else for a moment, even —or especially— the light turning the inside of his eyelids a yellow-pink color —color!— and just counted out his breathing pattern. Only when he felt he was no longer going to throw up or have a mental breakdown did he resume his trek down the hallway with his eyes still firmly shut. He had no idea how he could see again —as disorientating and nauseating as it now was—, but that mystery would have to come second. First was to figure out where he was and how he had gotten there.

Hopefully, discovering those facts would also help him deduce why his body felt entirely too short and disproportioned … and how in the name of the Six he could see again.

* * *

Something made him sit up in bed with a hoarse roar. Knowledge and memory danced before his eyes and he felt loss stab his heart before it was all suddenly locked away in the back of his mind where he could not reach it. He sat there in his bed, breathing hard and staring wildly around his room, trying to remember the things he could have sworn he had just forgotten —even though they were **important** , possibly the most important things in the world—. The memories would not come. They stayed just out of his reach, taunting him with feelings of victory and failure and loss and nostalgia that had no explanation.

He blinked a few times to focus his vision and realized with a jolt of surprise that everything was blurry because he was crying. With a low growl, he swiped the tears away and flung his legs over the side of the bed. Unease clawed at him as he stood up, intent on checking the house. He nearly overbalanced for a second as the sensation of _too-short-not-right_ swept over him, but then it was gone and his balance was back. He grabbed his favorite dagger off of the nightstand and stormed out into the darkened hallways of his house, trying to pinpoint why he suddenly felt so **angry** and **afraid**.

His father wasn’t in the house —he had mentioned staying late at the Citadel for a meeting hadn’t he?—, but aside from that, there were no signs of anything amiss. No evidence of intruders, no glaring indications that he had forgotten to do something important even though he was sure he had, was sure that something was **missing** with an intensity that made it hard to breathe. Finally, he rounded off his impromptu patrol by peeking into his little sister’s room, half afraid that she was gone and that the horrible feeling in his chest was because he had somehow sensed her being kidnapped or something.

But no. She was still there in her bed, curled up tight around the moogle toy he had won for her during that carnival last week, her breathing easy and peaceful. She was fine. He’d already checked on his mother and found her sound asleep too. Everything was fine.

So why did everything still feel wrong?

He carefully closed her door so as not to wake her —she was only three, she needed her sleep— and returned to his own bedroom. After twenty minutes of tossing, turning, and trying to quell the grinding sensation of unease in his stomach, he gave up and went downstairs to do some quiet workouts. If he was going to have adrenaline pumping through his veins for no reason, he might as well get something useful out of it. It might even help him relax and go back to sleep.

It didn’t.

* * *

He woke up, sobbing and screaming loud enough to make himself hoarse within seconds. His big brother burst into the room a moment later, carrying a bat over his shoulder as if expecting a violent intruder of some kind. But there was no intruder. Just a horrible, horrible feeling that something precious was _gone-gone-gone_ and impressions of glazed blue eyes that should have been dancing with light instead. He continued to cry, inconsolable despite his brother’s best efforts, plagued by memories he couldn’t catch and feelings he had never thought could hurt so much.

It took several minutes for him to stop screaming and hours before he stopped bursting into tears for no reason. The only thing that finally stemmed the tears was when, as he huddled next to his frantic brother on the couch, he caught sight of the sunrise through the window. All of his tears dried away as he stared at it, heedless of the way the light burned at his eyes, trying to understand why something so ordinary suddenly felt so breathtakingly wonderful and sad all at the same time. The sensation was so strong that after a few moments of staring he found himself scrambling out of his brother’s arms to find his camera and stumble outside to take picture after picture of it, heedless of the increasingly worried glances his brother sent him as the elder sibling tried to coax him back inside.

The steady click of the camera helped to soothe the deep ache in his heart, but it didn’t fix it.

Somehow, he didn’t think anything truly would.

* * *

He was alone when he woke up. Alone and too busy shuddering in remembered agony to scream. His mouth was open but he couldn’t get enough air to make a sound, every nerve was on fire but he couldn’t tell if it was literal fire or just his imagination as he fell out of bed and writhed on the ground, head in his hands and blood thundering through ears that shouldn’t have been working because he was _dead-dead-dead-_ ** _dead_**. The burning and disorientation wore off slowly and in its wake he felt like he was freezing. His limbs were shaking, he couldn’t think straight, everything was a blur of _confusion-sorrow-guilt-disbelief_ that made it hard to focus. He all but crawled to the bathroom, unable to keep his feet for more than a few seconds, and threw up into the toilet as soon as he reached it.

That, at least, felt real.

But **how**?

He was **dead**. He had **died** and in his dying he had **seen** -.

Too much.

He had seen too much, he had learned too much, because judgement was not kind and justice not fair — _fair is a human term_ , someone had told him once, _it means nothing to justice and judgement which care only for deed and not motive or heart_ and **oh** he knew that now in the marrow of his bones— and he had been shown how blind he’d been before the brutal end. _I’m sorry,_ flitted the thought, raw and bleeding through his mind as he shivered violently on the bathroom floor. _I’m so sorry._ He managed to crawl upright, leaning heavily against the battered sink —he knew this sink, he knew this **apartment** but that couldn’t be right, was the afterlife modeled on life and not on punishment and reward?— as he finally raised his head and looked at his reflection.

Tears turned to hysterical laughter.

His reflection was a **kid**. A teenager. A reckless, stupid, **teenager** and it was both the most relieving and revolting thing he’d ever seen. _I don’t understand. I don’t_ ** _understand_** _._ But maybe he didn’t have to. If this was- life or death or purgatory, he had **seen** and he knew what he had to do. What he deserved. He staggered out of the bathroom and made for the kitchen where the knives were, ignoring the frantic banging on the door that he wasn’t entirely certain even existed. He’d just gotten out the knife and was reaching for his hair when the door burst open. He was visible from the door, he knew, and before he could blink he had been tackled with a frantic shout. Arms wrapped around him, holding him down like he might struggle, but all he did was sag and cry, choking out his sins into a confused, disbelieving shoulder.

Somewhere in the crying, the knife was plucked from his hands and he let it, but the thought of it didn’t go away until he had spilled every rambling thought and story and sin and grief into the air while shaking arms held him tight and didn’t let go.

_There was a giant wave of magic through the whole city just now,_ he was told, _it did something to you. This isn’t you. You’ve done nothing wrong._

He just shook his head, because he had. He had and he had paid for it thrice over but it still didn’t feel like enough. Nothing felt like enough, even another death wouldn’t feel like enough, only something worse than death would surely be enough.

_Penance is enough,_ he was told stubbornly —desperately— instead, _if you have sinned, proclaim the Debt and serve until it is unmade._

The thought settled in his mind. Fragile and sharp-edged but … but better than the knife. Maybe.

Maybe.

They huddled together on the kitchen floor until dawn, until his shaking stopped and sanity returned and he promised through a hoarse throat not to touch the knives again for That Reason, because he could see now that it would be the wrong choice. It was still a tempting choice, but … but if this was real, if he had been given a second chance at life despite his death, then ruining it again would just be spitting in the face of this unexpected —undeserved— chance at redemption.

He closed his eyes in exhaustion and fell asleep despite his best effort. He dreamed, and when he dreamed, it was of a river-void and the call of a king he had answered with loyalty born of guilt and an aching, all-consuming desire to make right the biggest mistake he’d —they’d, though only he seemed to remember— ever made.

* * *

Pain in his entire body, but mostly in his left shoulder and arm. It throbbed and pulsed and in general felt like a Voretooth pack had just used him as a chew toy. It was bad, but not as bad as before, when the fire of those ancient smug sons of- — _no, better not finish that thought, they might be listening in somehow and decide to finish cooking him for his impudence_ — had burned up his arm and body and-.

Wait a second.

Someone was grabbing him, shaking his shoulder —not the broken one thankfully, but it still hurt like blazes— and shouting at him from far away. _Concussed then. Really concussed. I should probably stay awake then._ Except he couldn’t stay awake because he was dead, wasn’t he?

He had to be. He remembered dying. So why-?

He cracked open his eyes and stared dazedly at the figures crowding around him, shouting and shaking and gesturing at each other in clear confusion and concern. He recognized most of the faces as people who were dead too. Which meant he was dead, but for some reason arriving in the afterlife felt like being run over by a Behemoth or falling from several stories up after a failed warp.

_Not fair._ He groused mentally. He’d had enough concussions and broken bones and throbbing body-sized bruises in life thank-you-very-much, he really didn’t think he deserved them in death. Especially after how he’d died. Someone slapped his cheek and he hazily opened his eyes again —when had he closed them?— and tried to focus on the face of his best friend directly above him. He felt a swoop of dread upon seeing that face, because that particular friend wasn’t supposed to be dead, he had an important mission to complete and couldn’t **afford** to be dead.

He was fairly certain he must have whined something along those lines through clenched teeth, because the face above his turned incredulous, then absolutely terrified. He wanted to protest that the expression on his friend’s face **really** wasn’t helping his case, but then blackness encroached his vision and he realized that passing out from pain was apparently a thing in the afterlife as much as normal life.

His final thought was that if this was the afterlife, he would like a refund to go be a disembodied ghost instead please. You couldn’t hurt if you didn’t have a body, right?

Though, knowing his luck, ghosts probably had perpetual motion sickness from floating all the time. Which would explain the moaning…

Then blackness finally won out over the frantic yelling and painful shaking of his shoulders and cut off his thoughts before they could get any more nonsensical.


	3. Return of the King

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes the chap title is a shameless reference, no I feel no shame. :)

(Two weeks after the Wave)

“Noctis? Noctis, are you awake?” _No. Go away. Wanna sleep some more._ A featherlight touch on his shoulder dragged him further out of the depths of sleep and toward waking reality. Something felt … wrong about waking up. But he couldn’t pinpoint what it was or why.

He tried to go back to sleep — _things would probably make more sense next time he tried to wake up_ —, but then a smooth hand curled around his and Ignis’s voice — _oddly young and high-sounding, but still undeniably Ignis_ — choked out, “Please, Noct. If you can hear me, open your eyes. **Please** …” Ignis sounded so tired and fragile. It physically hurt to hear his friend and advisor sound so broken. Had someone hurt Ignis? Protective anger stirred and drove away the last vestiges of sleep and, with a final heave of willpower, Noctis opened his eyes to check on his friend.

He screwed them shut a moment later. Wherever he was was far too bright, it hurt his eyes. The hand holding his let go and there was scrambling and shuffling that faded slightly with distance. The light pressing against his eyelids dimmed substantially and a few moments later the hand was holding his again, “Try opening them now, Noct, I’ve turned the lights down.” Noctis felt his face scrunch from the effort, but managed to pry his eyes open again. A high, airy white ceiling with golden engravings was above his head and Noctis tried dully to figure out why it was felt so familiar and yet so wrong. Wasn’t there something he had been doing earlier that was important? Something that kept him from this place? Something-.

_Fire, darkness, daemons, anger, Luna, Ardyn, the Ancient Kings, his father, the agony in his body compounded by the sudden seizing in his chest as the sword thrust home-._

Noctis jolted up, breathing shallow and sharp as he barely swallowed back a scream. Hands were instantly on his shoulders, gentle but firm, “Breathe, Noct. It’s okay. I’m here, I’m right here, just take deep breaths.” Noctis grabbed the arms holding his shoulders, his flickering gaze moving away from the room with its towering windows and ornate furniture to the face of an Ignis he hadn’t seen in twelve- no, **twenty-two** years.

Solemn green eyes — _not clouded and ruined by Noctis’s mistakes, Noctis’s_ ** _failures_** — locked with his, drinking in Noctis’s features as Noctis drank in Ignis’s, “It’s alright, Noct. You are-,” Ignis’s voice cracked and Noctis saw tears shine in green eyes, “you are alright.”

Noctis opened his mouth, closed it, then whispered, “…Ignis?” Noctis jolted, the voice that had spoken was far too high and frail and surely that wasn’t **his** voice? It was not the drawl of a young adult like he was used to or even the slightly rough rumble of his thirty year old self from just before his death. That had been the voice of a small child.

A child with a very dry throat.

A coughing fit erupted even as he finished that thought and Ignis — _it_ ** _was_** _Ignis, but it was Ignis when he was_ ** _ten_** — pursed his lips and let go of one of Noctis’s shoulders to reach around the medical equipment — _when had that stuff gotten there?_ — and pick up a glass of water from the nightstand. Ignis coaxed Noctis into sipping from the glass as soon as the fit had subsided. Noctis let him, allowing the soft tones of his first friend-brother wash over him and keep him somewhat calm as his mind scrambled to figure out what was happening.

Memories trickled in and sorted themselves into place and realization hit Noctis so hard that he almost dropped the glass. _I died. But then … I didn’t die. I … the current. I went up the current. I had help. Luna? Yes. Luna and-,_ Noctis stared at Ignis, hope warring with disbelief and cynicism — _because his luck was never that good_ — and wondered if … if…

“Chocobros.” The word — _a silly, punny, nonsense word that Prompto had made up while on their road trip when trying to make a team name for them_ — slipped hesitantly from his lips. It was a test. An unfair, impossible test because the only way Ignis would know the answer was if he was from the future too and had experienced that year where it had all come crashing down and had heard Prompto’s silly jokes that kept their spirits up even as everything else went wrong. At this point in time — _if this was really time-travel and not some kind of death hallucination_ —, Ignis wouldn’t even know who Prompto was or that he **existed** let alone that one cringeworthy in-joke that had refused to die-.

“Prompto.” All of Noctis’s thoughts crashed to a halt and his gaze refocused on Ignis. Ignis’s lips curled in a faint, fragile smile, “I do hope that horrible joke isn’t the only thing you recall of that road trip, Noct.”

“You remember.”

“I do.”

Noctis swallowed hard, studying his friend’s weary posture as Ignis settled back in the chair next to Noctis’s bedside, “…How?”

Ignis was watching Noctis as if the latter might disappear the moment Ignis took his eyes off the prince-king, “According to Lady Lunafreya, you called for me, and I answered.”

Noctis’s heart lurched in his chest and up to his throat as he processed all of the implications that simple sentence held — _that Luna was alive, that Luna remembered too, that Ignis had somehow had contact with Luna to discuss what was going on_ — and he suddenly realized where he was, “Tenebrae. We’re in Tenebrae. H-how? It isn’t- I don’t-.”

Ignis took one of Noctis’s hands reassuringly, “Breathe, Noct.” Noctis shakily did as instructed and Ignis waited a few seconds to allow Noctis to regain control before he answered, “According to Lady Lunafreya, you forced the time stream of Eos to somehow … reverse around you and … a few others. You reversed it quite a ways before finally reentering the timeline, dragging us along with you in the process. As such, the year is M.E. Seven Forty-Four, twenty-two years prior to your-.” Ignis’s breath hitched and his Hand swallowed hard before continuing, “Prior to the end of the Long Night. We are currently in Tenebrae, in Fenestala Manor, under the care of Her Majesty Sylva and her family. You were brought here for treatment after-.”

“The daemon attack when I was eight. I remember.” Noctis forcibly shoved down the part of him that wanted to break down crying from relief and anger and a million other emotions and instead stepped clumsily back into the shoes of a king — _shoes he had learned how to fill for all of two weeks or so before dying but had also worn for years- no, don’t think about that_ —, “You weren’t here last time.”

Ignis ran his free hand through his hair, “Last time, you had already awoken from your coma in Lucis, so while your injuries were still severe, my past self was not **quite** as frantic. Furthermore, in the previous timeline, I did not beg on my hands and knees to accompany you and King Regis when it became clear that he was going to risk removing you from the Citadel hospital wing to take you elsewhere for further medical treatment.”

Noctis’s heart did another lurch. Ignis — _proud, dignified Ignis_ — had **begged** his father to come along. And his father was here, his father was **alive** and Noctis still had a chance to say everything he had been too immature to and now his eyes were burning and no- stop. Break later. Focus on something else, anything else, “And he let you come? Just like that?”

Ignis hesitated and pushed his glasses further up his nose, “…Not exactly.”

Noctis couldn’t stop a tiny smile at Ignis’s tone, seriousness of death and time-travel and old-new regrets momentarily forgotten, “What’d you do?”

The disgruntled look on Ignis’s face was almost enough to make Noctis laugh, “I was ordered to go back inside the Citadel. Which I did. I then exited the building a second time and smuggled myself into the Regalia’s trunk. By the time I was discovered, King Regis deemed that he had covered too much ground to simply turn around and return me to Insomnia. He also made the correct assumption that if I was turned over to the Hunters for safe delivery back home, I would endeavor to escape and smuggle myself to Tenebrae via another, far more dangerous way. As such, he allowed me to accompany the two of you for the rest of the journey.”

Noctis did laugh at that and both men-turned-boys politely ignored the watery quality of the sound, “Holy Shiva, I think all those midnight excursions into Imperial bases has corrupted you, Iggy. I mean, subterfuge against the Empire was one thing, but smuggling yourself into the Regalia right under my dad’s nose?”

Ignis didn’t laugh, “I was not going to let you go anywhere without me, Noct. Not again. Not-.” his voice broke and in that second, Noctis saw the world-weary, blind, thirty two year old man Ignis really was instead of the stubborn but soft-spoken ten year old he appeared to be. The fragile —false— atmosphere of normalcy and humor that they had been struggling to maintain cracked and the air became stifling.

Noctis squeezed the hand holding his tentatively, “Ignis, I…”

“Don’t.” The word was rough, like it had been dragged over shards of glass just to be heard, “Just … don’t. There is nothing you can say. It wasn’t your fault. You did your duty, you fulfilled your destiny and I- I-.” He didn’t seem able to finish the sentence. Ignis began to blink rapidly, “I couldn’t-.” Ignis jerked his gaze away from Noctis and squeezed his eyes shut, as if looking at anything was simply too painful.

Noctis studied their hands. Far too small, far too pale, with none of the callouses or scars they had gained and still bore on their souls. Noctis’s own hand was especially frail, tiny and thin and he briefly wondered how long he had been in a coma. How long Ignis had been forced to stay by Noctis’s bedside with memories of Noctis’s death in the forefront of his mind and no guarantee that Noctis was not about to die in his sleep twenty two years early. He worked his jaw, “It wasn’t your fault Iggy. You didn’t fail me-.”

“All I ever **did** was fail you!” The outburst startled Noctis, made him flinch from the high pitch that still somehow conveyed years of guilt and grief and pain. Ignis jerked his hand out of Noctis’s grip and began to stalk back and forth by the bed, “I broke an oath, Noctis! I broke so many- I was to protect you, help you find your way, ‘ **ever at your side** ’! And in the end what good was I? I slowed you down, I couldn’t protect you, Ardyn came for you and I could do **nothing**! Then I wake up in the past and **what is the first thing I hear**? That you were attacked by daemons and was in a coma and **I wasn’t there**!”

“Iggy, you couldn’t have-.”

“ **But I should have**!”

Silence fell, harsh and sharp and difficult to breathe through as Noctis struggled with what to say and Ignis tried wrestle his emotions back under control. Ignis abruptly rubbed a hand underneath his glasses and muttered a curse so coarse even Gladio would have flinched at it. Noctis saw a tear trickle down Ignis’s face and remembered that final camp night, that private moment when Ignis’s blind eyes had shed a mere two tears and suddenly Noctis was tired of being a king or a prince. For once — _just once_ — Noctis wanted to be what he should have been, what he felt like he had never been enough of during his entire relationship with Ignis.

He wanted to just be a friend.

He wanted to be Ignis’s equal for once, not just the prince and his Hand who was always pushing Noctis to be better, to be more mature. He didn’t want Ignis to have to feel responsible for him, beholden to him. Ignis hardly ever cried, and shouted even less. He was always in control, always the voice of calm, always the shoulder to cry on.

And just once, Noctis wished he could be those things for Ignis too.

“Come here.” He spoke without thinking, the command sharp and absolute despite the eight year old voice it was delivered in.

Ignis flinched before he took a deep, shaky breath and obediently came to stand by Noctis’s bedside. Noctis grabbed Ignis’s wrist and, heedless of the medical equipment around him, pulled Ignis onto the bed with him. Ignis gave a faint squawk, “Noct, what-,” but Noctis cut him off with a tense, awkward hug.

Frail child fingers clutched at Ignis’s shirt as he blurted out what Ignis had prevented him from saying before, “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. I was- Shiva, I was such a brat to you -to all of you- sometimes, especially during that roadtrip and yet you … you stayed with me. Ever at my side.”

Ignis began to protest again but Noctis pushed on, “ **No** , Ignis. You didn’t fail me. You didn’t- You **never** -.” Where to even begin? Where to end? What to say? “You never failed me.” Ignis had been there always, even at the very end, in those last moments amid the Other when Ardyn had tried to kill him one last time and Noctis had been so **tired** and Noctis- Noctis… “I was the one who failed **you**.”

Ignis scoffed hoarsely, “You saved the world.”

“And I left you guys alone in the process. I made you bury me, I went somewhere I knew you couldn’t follow and then I somehow dragged you all the way back here for my own selfish reasons and for that I’m **sorry**.”

“You could hardly help-.”

“Then you couldn’t help it either.”

“I-.”

Noctis grit his teeth, “No.”

Silence returned, but it was not so sharp, not so harsh and dangerous. It was just … sad. Broken. The silence of two brothers who blamed themselves, the silence of things that had been done and — _while they had been undone_ — would take years — _if ever_ — to be truly fixed. Ignis took off his glasses and threw them on the bed, then shifted in Noctis’s frustratingly short arms so that he was more comfortable and carefully — _as if he was afraid Noctis would break if he squeezed too hard_ — returned Noctis’s hug.

Noctis felt his shirt grow wet with tears, but he did not utter a word of protest. Ignis had always been his anchor, his emotional strength when things became too much. But now Ignis was the one who needed an anchor, who needed a shoulder to finally cry on. So Noctis bottled up his own tears and simply held his friend, doing his best to be for Ignis what Ignis had always been for him.

They stayed there together for a long time, unmoving as they silently mourned the prices that came of promises broken and duties fulfilled.

* * *

King Regis rubbed his temples, feeling weariness and confusion and worry war inside him as he strode down the halls of Fenestala Manor. He hadn’t wanted to leave his comatose son’s side for any reason, but the reaction of the Crystal to Noctis’s grievous injury —an event quickly becoming known around the world as simply The Wave— had had ramifications that required his attention.

According to reports, The Wave had encompassed the entire surface of the planet with its magic, something Regis hadn’t thought was possible, not until the Prophecy was fulfilled at least —and that thought terrified him, because the Prophecy could only be fulfilled by Noctis’s death, the death of a boy currently only eight years old—. Upon comparing intelligence garnered by their respective information networks, Regis and Queen Sylva had determined that after The Wave, the daemons had retreated. Or not “retreated”. Perhaps “disappeared” was the better word for it.

No one had seen any sign of the creatures since The Wave, no further night attacks had been reported. Even the Hunters who had braved locations such as the old Balouve Mines and Keycatrich Trench —both infamous their daemon populations— had come back empty-handed and uninjured, bringing reports of absolute silence and not so much as a daemon track even at the lowest, darkest levels.

It was as if the daemons had never existed in the first place.

Regis remembered The Wave rushing out of the darkness and over his skin, leaving behind a distinct sense of loss and memory he could not catch. He recalled the howling scream of the massive daemon he had been about to battle as it disintegrated and became less than dust as The Wave passed over it and privately suspected that when the Crystal had unleashed The Wave, it had not just destroyed the daemon threatening Noctis.

It had destroyed **all** of them.

As baffling —and potentially frightening— as that was, it was of lesser concern to Regis than the reports he and Queen Sylva had received about the recent movements of the Empire. Warfronts suddenly halted, the vast majority of their army not so much withdrawing as being —as testified by several of his most trustworthy Kingsglaive who had been in battle at the time— **destroyed** by The Wave in a manner eerily similar to what Regis had seen occur to the daemon.

Their machinery and ships lay abandoned, unmanned and many times unsalvageable from crashing mid-operation at the sudden disappearance of their pilots. The remaining soldiers —those that were not machines and magitek—, their officers, and the war beasts had all either retreated to their bases or scattered to the winds. Imperial airwaves were filled with frantic reports of the mysterious destruction of their soldiers and the Chancellor —arguably the only man charismatic enough to calm the Niflheim masses at this point— had yet to issue any kind of public statement or make any appearances.

The warrior in Regis —the part of him that had been honed to a fine edge years ago on that fateful roadtrip— urged him to take advantage of the situation and order his glaives to move forward, claim as much lost territory as possible before the Empire could retaliate. He had already sent word to Clarus and Cor along those lines, granting permission for his old friends to capitalize on the moment of weakness or proceed with caution as he saw fit. But the warrior and king in Regis longed to be there personally, in command and in control, if only to ensure the best outcome for his people.

But the father in him, burdened with a comatose son and the knowledge of a destiny far greater —and weightier— than Lucis alone had won out over the warrior and king for once. He needed to be with his son. To be by his son’s side when he awoke … or when he passed on, according to fate’s choice. The only reason he had left the room —let alone gone to a different wing of the Manor entirely— to hold council with Queen Sylva was because Ignis had forcibly come along and even now kept watch over Noctis on Regis’s behalf.

Regis paced up the winding staircase that led back to the guest wing of the Manor, nodding to the guards posted at the outermost perimeters of the wing —and only the perimeter, to ensure the privacy of their guests and the security of the foreign king— as he passed. As he walked, he allowed his mind to drift to yet another troublesome matter. Young Ignis. The boy had always been loyal. Ever since the day Regis had personally introduced them, Ignis had faithfully stayed by Noctis’s side, doing his best to offer advice or support by turns to the young prince. He had always been serious for a boy his age, but after The Wave…

Something had changed.

Everyone in the Citadel had reported intense emotions and feelings that something important had been learned and forgotten in the moments that The Wave passed over them. Everyone had been horribly shaken the night Noctis had been brought back to the Citadel and rushed straight to the medical ward, blood freely staining the medical gurney —just as it had already stained Regis’s hands and clothes, like a butcher and his lamb- no, don’t think like that— and many had panicked at the sight. But no reaction, not even Regis’s own terror, could be compared to that of young Ignis when he had come staggering down the corridors, looking extremely unbalanced and confused, and had caught sight of Noctis going by on the gurney.

Ignis had screamed. Not the scream of a boy at the sight of blood or the injury of a friend, but the gut-twisting howl of a man who’s soul had just been ripped away, who had just seen his entire world burned to ash before his eyes. It was a sound Regis had only heard the like of on the battlefield. A sound made by soldiers when they finally snapped under the pressure and all of the horrors, all of the nightmares that had been previously repressed finally burst out in a wave of self-destructive grief and madness. A scream of years of anguish and heartache and burdens suddenly too heavy to bear.

It was a scream no one with a mere ten years of life should have been able to make.

The boy had had to be sedated, such had been the feral intensity of his attempts to reach Noctis’s side. Later, when he had awoken, the first and only words on his lips had been to demand Noctis’s status and beg to be taken to the prince’s side over and over until the doctors had complied. Ignis had stayed with Noctis the entire time the Citadel doctors struggled to determine why Noctis was still in a coma post the initial surgeries and how to safely awaken him, an even more steady fixture in the room than Regis himself. Not always watching —he had suddenly developed an odd habit for moving about with his eyes closed—, but when his eyes were open, the age and knowing and ache in them told Regis that for all the rest of the world struggled with the sensation of forgetting…

Ignis struggled with the weight of remembrance.

Regis would fully admit —if only in his own mind— to being too much of a coward to ask what it was Ignis remembered. What the Crystal had shown Ignis during The Wave to make the boy so brokenly loyal that he would first abandon his dignity to beg on his hands and knees to stay by Noctis’s side, then disobey a direct order of the king to do so anyway when his begging had been denied. Regis knew he would have to ask someday, rip open the wound he could almost see oozing from Ignis’s soul and force Ignis to relive it so that Regis would know what had happened. But with two broken boys on his hands to care for, a kingdom to run, and a world gone mad to make sense of, he just … couldn’t. Not yet. Not now.

Hopefully not for a long time.

Regis sighed, his steps halting just outside the door to Noctis’s room, reluctant to enter and see the unmoving form of his beloved child and the haunted eyes —too old, too knowing— of Ignis. Queen Sylva had already looked over his son several times during the past week and had yet to determine what was keeping him in a coma even as his back injury healed so steadily under her magic. She had promised to come within the next few hours to try a different treatment, but she too had a kingdom to run and —if the look in young Ravus’s and Luna’s eyes when they’d met were any indication— broken children to look after.

He closed his eyes and rested his forehead lightly on the thick door, trying to settle his thoughts and restore the mask of calm he had to hold in place for young Ignis’s sake. The hall was empty around him, no one there to witness his moment of weakness or interrupt the silence with words-.

“-should not have lost control of my emotions like that.” _Ignis?_ It sounded as if Ignis was talking to someone. Noctis possibly? Speaking aloud in the hopes the prince would hear him, or to alleviate his own guilt to an audience that could not judge him?

“No. You had every right.” Regis felt his heart stop at the soft reproach that drifted through the door. That was not Ignis’s voice. “Stop acting like you’re fine when your not, Ignis. I’m not-,” Regis’s heart restarted and he flung open the door, not caring that he no doubt looked as wild-eyed as a startled Coeurl or that the door had just slammed into the wall with a noise akin to a gunshot.

He sidestepped the dagger Ignis threw at his face by no more than a few centimeters and ran into the room, rushing for the bedside of a startled, wide-eyed, **awake** Noctis only to be halted by the sudden appearance of Ignis balanced on the bed in a crouch and with a lance several sizes too large for the ten year old and held it just under Regis’s throat.

His first instinct was to swat the lance aside with one of his own daggers and continue his rush to his son’s side. But a swift glance at the painfully blank expression on Ignis’s face had him take a reluctant step back and spread his hands away from his sides to show he was unarmed instead.

Ignis’s muscles spasmed at his motion and his son —awake, awake, but somehow not quite anymore— flinched away, hands curling around an invisible hilt while his body hunched for a blow and Regis felt his heart break. He took another slow step back, just as he would when he accidentally startled Cor or Clarus with a loud noise and they slid into that nightmarish place between reality and the memories of battles and blood, just as he would for any war-haunted soldier he had frightened.

Ignis was breathing too fast. His muscles were wire-tight and his eyes glazed in that distinctive way that meant he was more than halfway lost to the hell of flashbacks that had taken Regis years to overcome —though not completely, never completely, and why did the child before him have such clear signs of a soldier’s trauma?— and Regis spoke in the softest voice he could muster, “Noctis, Ignis, it is alright. I will not harm you. Do you recognize me? Do you know where you are? I am Regis, you are in Tenebrae, in Fenestala Manor. We are guests of Queen Sylva and her family. No one will harm you here. Can you hear me? It is alright.”

The glaze cleared from Ignis’s eyes first and with a look of horror he de-summoned the lance that he shouldn’t have been able to summon in the first place, “Y-your Majesty, I-!”

Regis risked a dismissive gesture, but kept the majority of his posture loose and unthreatening, “There was no harm done, Ignis. I should not have entered so unexpectedly. But I…” his eyes drifted to his son again and he felt his heart fall rather than rise, “Noctis?”

Noctis’s eyes were still wrong, no longer glazed so much as wild and shining with tears and a disbelief that hurt Regis more than any of the injuries he had received over his years, “Dad?” The eight year old voice cracked with something too old for it to convey and a small, shaking hand reached out and clamped tight on Ignis’s sleeve, “I-Iggy? Iggy, do you-? I-.”

Ignis slid into a seated position on the bed and laid a hand over the trembling fingers that clutched his sleeve in silent support, “I see him, Noct. He’s real. I promise.” Noctis … wasn’t sure of his reality? Or at least, not of **Regis**. He seemed convinced that Ignis, at least, was real, but for him to doubt… what had happened while Regis was gone? How long had his son been awake without his father there to comfort him?

He pushed his questions to the back of his mind, because the shining in his son’s eyes had spilled over and there were tears flowing freely down his face and Regis wanted so badly to run to his son’s bedside and just **hold him**.

But he didn’t. For a long moment, he **couldn’t**. Because there were not just tears on Noctis’s face, but a fragile, tiny, **old** smile that lit weary blue eyes and for a moment Regis could have sworn that there was no boy in the bed, but a man —a **king** — who had seen the light and dark of the world and had finally, finally come home. Noctis choked out a soft, “Dad” but for that eternal second Regis couldn’t hear his child’s voice. All he could hear was the tired, battle-worn sigh of a grown man, a whisper in the back of his mind and the depths of his soul that said, _“I’m home. I walked tall.”_ And Regis could not breathe because he suddenly **understood**.

There was no concrete evidence for the realization that stabbed deep into his heart. No proof that he could give to the reasoning mind that would convey the depths of his certainty, yet the certainty was there and it would not leave. Because Regis had felt what it was like to experience the Things-That-Have-Not-Yet-Been before. He had walked through time once as a powerless ghost and he knew the feeling of knowledge that should not be known but could not be forgotten. He knew what it was to **see** and to be changed by it forever in a way even those closest to him would never comprehend.

He did not know how, he did not think he **wanted** to know how, but somehow his son had lived before. Somehow his son —and Ignis too, because he had been right before, no child could make such a scream— had already lived and grown and **died** and come back to do it all again for reasons Regis did not believe he would ever truly comprehend. The Wave had not been an inexplicable event, had not been a reaction of the Crystal to a child’s endangerment at the claws of the daemon. It had been a reaction to Noctis’s **death** , to a destiny that had already been fulfilled but now had somehow been subverted at the same time.

_“I’m home. I walked tall.”_

Regis felt his feet come unstuck from the floor and within a few swift strides had crossed the final distance between him and his child —who was no longer a child, not really, and oh how Regis **grieved** at that knowledge—. Ignis shifted out of his way and, careful of the medical equipment still attached to his son, Regis wrapped his arms tight around his first and only child. The conflicting feelings of guilt and grief and happiness choked his throat, but Regis forced them aside to say the words he could feel on the tip of his tongue, “Welcome home. I am so proud of you … my brave, brave son.”

Noctis went stiff in his arms and both his and Ignis’s breath hitched as the two boys-who-were-men realized what he had said, what he understood. Then Noctis sagged into Regis’s arms, sobs shaking his tiny shoulders as he clutched Regis’s sleeves, “I **missed you**. So much. I never got- I never said-!” Regis pressed his face against Noctis’s hair and shushed him, aware that for all the years his son had lived-yet-not, right now he needed to be a child again. If only for the moment, if only while Regis’s arms were tight around him for the first time in what to Regis was two weeks but to Noctis must have been **years**.

“I love you.” The whisper was breathed into Regis’s chest, barely understandable beneath their tears and the thick fabric of Regis’s dress jacket. He heard them anyway. Just as Regis heard the mountain of silent apologies and unspoken regrets and grief that told him all-too-clearly what had happened to him in the future. That he had not died a peaceful death.

His hand crept up to cradle Noctis’s head, aware and distantly grateful that Ignis had moved to the far corner of the room and was staring out the windows in some effort to give them privacy, “I love you too, my son.”

Regis knew that he would have to summon Queen Sylva and the doctors soon. Noctis needed treatment for his physical injuries. Rehabilitation —both mental and physical— would have to be arranged, and through it all he would still have his duties as king to attend to. But for now…

For now that could wait.

For now he would hold his son, he would mourn his child’s death.

And he would cherish the second chance he had been unaware he needed or had received until now.


End file.
